pittsburgh employment lawyer
Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:38:37 -0400 - Posted in ephedra lawyer michigan
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As a symbol of invisible effort at the turn of the twentieth century, consider the glass bottle. The focus of complex manufacturing and distribution systems, the bottle was likely an afterthought to those who used it. The labor equivalents of this mundane utility – Elsa Peretti Cross pendant unseen foundation of the industry – were called snapping-up boys and cleaning-off boys. If James L. Flannery’s fine book does nothing else, it succeeds at re-creating the world of children who earned meager wages by assisting men in the production of bottles. Simply fleshing out their experiences would be a triumph. Fortunately, The Glass House Boys of Pittsburgh has bigger ambitions, as it considers definitions of childhood, the physical and political contours of work, and the logic and practice of reform.
After surveying turn-of-the-century child employment and the general program of the National Child Labor Committee (nci.c), Flannery demonstrates just how difficult it was for the nclc to eradicate child labor in Pittsburgh. Reformers had to combat both the “class-driven agency” with which manual workers sent their sons to glass factories and government inspectors who rarely targeted child labor. A close reading of Pennsylvania factory inspection reports reveals Elsa Peretti Open Heart bangle system “more responsive to the industrial interests of rhe stare rhan ir was in actively enforcing rhe letter, much less the spirit, of the law” (p. 59).
Government officials and factory owners shared goals. Since the early nineteenth century, glassmakers honed their production methods and lobbying skills. When Pittsburgh bottle makers persisted with the hand method to avoid expensive mechanization, all involved understood that the strategy required even more cheap work from children. In wonderfully detailed pages on the introduction of the Owens Automatic Bottle Machine, Elsa Peretti Open Heart bracelet narrates the thorny politics of technological adoption. Editors of the leading trade newspaper warned that owners would flood glass houses with foreign men and black women if child labor legislation forced their hand. Even the most powerful glassblowers’ union viewed child labor as a prerequisite to guarding the position of its skilled members. Reformers could recruit labor to their cause only if blowers kept their jobs in mechanized, boy-free factories. That combination was impossible in the botde trade; adult job security required child employment.
Flannery excels at rhetorical analysis; when he considers passages from reform pamphlets, legislative acts, and trade newspapers, he exhumes their buried strategies. What emerges most from his digging is the freshest aspect of the book: the view that reformers failed to confront the economic demands that made the middle-class expectation of a cosseted childhood impossible for working families. School might have beckoned to working boys, but “the ability to utilize the developing systems of public Elsa Peretti Open Heart drop earrings became a mark of class difference” when lawmaking and profit-seeking merged (p. 163). Political/industrial alliances are a dime a dozen, of course, but rarely have such collaborations benefited from the added power of organized labor. The book will impress specialists in political discourse, students of rhe history of work, and all readers interested in the story of childhood in the United States.
